The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
In a data communications network configured according to the Service Insertion Architecture of Cisco Systems, Inc., San Jose, Calif., a Service Broker node provides a Service Classifier node with a service header and a corresponding next hop node that can provide a specified service. The Service Classifier attaches the header to a packet that needs to be serviced and then tunnels the packet to the next hop node. As a result, packets can receive complex services using a network of service nodes not strictly known to the sender of the packets. The architecture can be deployed in an Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) network and there is no present approach to use IP version 6 (IPv6) or to address particular problems that the IPv6 packet format introduces.
IPv4 and IPv6 are defined in numerous Request for Comments (RFC) publications of the Internet Engineering Task Force, such as RFC 2460, which is the basic IPv6 specification. RFC publications are available on the World Wide Web at the domain ietf.org.